TEAM FORTRESS 2. WHERE DID THIS COME FROM? Hey, they're still making it! It's got a totally exaggerated, crazy art style now. Looks a little like Spy vs. Spy or No One Lives Forever, kind of a '60s spy feel. It's going to be the included multiplayer mode in Episode 2! Class-based, etc. You know the drill. Great news for shooter fans. We all thought this game was dead years ago.

And hey, Half-Life 2: Ep 2 will ship for Xbox 360 and PS3 simultaneously with the PC. The console games will basically include all of the HL2 back content, so you'll get everything on there that you can get on the PC. Who expected all this Valve news?

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I think it looks pretty snazzy. Like a much better looking version of Evil Genius. I applaud them for going in a new direction with the game and I think not looking like every other multiplayer military FPS on the market will be beneficial. The extremely unique silhouette of each character class is also intriguing.

Holy shit.. I saw that on the front page and was thinking is April fools already? I remember years and years ago being interested in TF2, but then as the years kept going by I gradually lost all interest and completely forgot about it. (Just another 'Duke Nukem Forever')

Back in '99 I interviewed one of the TF guys on BotEpidemic.com asking about the bot AI and he responded exactly "The bots will play as Commanders, squad leaders, and all other available classes." That quote alone had me hooked. I hope they didn't give up on the bots after all these years.

Remember TF2 was originally planned as an expansion to QUAKE 2!

I'm definitely getting this either way, but I'll be going with the Xbox 360 version because my computer is so far behind in the times it's not even worth gaming on anymore.

In any case, great news indeed! Now lets just hope they don't delay episode two for a long, long time..

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Team Fortress 2 Teaser ImpressionsValve's class-based shooter arises from the dead with a wholly unique look and style.by Chris Roper July 14, 2006 - Nearly 10 years ago, a trio of fellows named Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley released what would go down as one of the most important mod releases to date, Team Fortress. The free modification for the original Quake brought about class-based team play into the world of 3D shooters, allowing players the ability to take on the roles of a sniper, spy, medic and more and make use of their specialized skills in a slew of multiplayer modes, including Capture the Flag and Attack and Defend.

The game was successful enough that the team formed TeamFortress Software to begin work on Team Fortress 2, what was then intended to be a commercial mod for Quake II. Valve Software quickly snatched up the young development house and released their sequel work as Team Fortress Classic, a free mod for Valve's own Half-Life. After its release, Valve announced that work on Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms was underway and a short while later released a handful of screenshots and a gameplay trailer.

The Old Look....

For its time, the game looked to feature some extremely impressive technology, like proximity-based lip syncing on characters that matched actual players' voice chatting in-game. It also looked to have changed style quite a bit, shifting from the original Team Fortress' hectic play to a much more realistic combat simulation. Unfortunately, the screenshots released in 2001 were the last time that any concrete information had been heard about the game, until now.

Valve has now revealed that Team Fortress 2 will make up the multiplayer component for its forthcoming Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Along with Valve's experimental first-person puzzler, Portal, Team Fortress 2 will be a standalone game but essentially free as part of the Episode Two package. No price has been given as of yet, but it's assumed that it'll run for $19.95 like Episode One.

... And The New Look

Team Fortress 2 will feature nearly all of the classes from the original game, including the Heavy, Spy, Scout, Demolitions, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, Soldier and Pyro, making for nine classes in all. Valve hasn't released any sort of information on what loadouts each class will carry.

While the classes have largely stayed the same, one thing that's extremely unique about Team Fortress 2 is its look. While the video that we saw was an edited-together montage, it featured in-game footage of the characters posing smugly for the camera, giving us a great look at the game's art and rendering style. Characters have been designed in a highly exaggerated fashion, drawing attention to what we'd assume would be their main attributes. From the sickly-thin frame for the sniper (the better to hide with) to the massive hulking arms for the heavy, it looks like you'll easily be able to spot character classes in the middle of a battlefield.

The most unique thing about the characters' looks however is the way they're rendered. Using a brand-new lighting system implemented into Source, the characters look like a cross between an action figure and a cartoon. They're clearly 3D, but feature very little texture detail. The lighting is extremely smooth however, giving them the appearance of being sculpted models or something similar - Toy Story-esque is the description that probably comes closest.

The teaser that we saw showed little more than the characters posing for a quick bit, so as of yet we know nothing about game types, map designs or anything else of that sort. Team Fortress 2 (along with HL2: Episode Two and Portal) do not have a firm release date as of yet, but being as Valve plans to ship Half-Life 2 (along with Episode One and Two, Portal and TF2) to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at the same time as the PC release of Episode Two, we can expect mid-November to be the earliest we'll get our hands on it. On the other hand, Valve had planned to ship Episode Two roughly six months after Episode One, which released on June 1st, so plan on seeing the game sometime this winter season.

Suhweet!

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Anyone else miss the 'old TF2? The one they previewed years ago as being a military realistic shooter? Bots that would learn the maps as they played, building sentry guns and seeing where they get the most kills to concentrate on that area, etc..

This new one looks like a cartoon, and if it were just a new game I woudn't care, but it's that I've been waiting on this game for around 7 years now, and to discover this new cartoony "multiplayer only" game.. really just disapointments me.

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Which is being developed by those who left Trauma Studios (makers of the Desert Combat mod for BF1942) when that was basically killed post BF2 release. DiCE decided they wanted to close the New York based studio and instead of moving to Sweden to become part of Digital Illusions they formed a new studio.